Not until dinner was finished and father and son had repaired to the library for their coffee and cigars did Bryce Cardigan advert to the subject of his father's business affairs.
“Well, John Cardigan,” he declared comfortably, “to-day is Friday. I'll spend Saturday and Sunday in sinful sloth and the renewal of old acquaintance, and on Monday I'll sit in at your desk and give you a long-deferred vacation. How about that programme, pard?”
“Our affairs are in such shape that they could not possibly be hurt or bettered, no matter who takes charge of them now,” Cardigan replied bitterly. “We're about through. I waited too long and trusted too far; and now—well, in a year we'll be out of business.”
“Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me everything right to the end. George Sea Otter informed me that you've been having trouble with this Johnny-come-lately, Colonel Pennington. Is he the man who has us where the hair is short?”
The old man nodded.
“The Squaw Creek timber deal, eh?” Bryce suggested.
Again the old man nodded. “You wrote me all about that,” Bryce continued. “You had him blocked whichever way he turned—so effectually blocked, in fact, that the only pleasure he has derived from his investment since is the knowledge that he owns two thousand acres of timber with the exclusive right to pay taxes on it, walk in it, look at it and admire it—in fact, do everything except log it, mill it, and realize on his investment. It must make him feel like a bally jackass.”
“On the other hand,” his father reminded him, “no matter what the Colonel's feeling on that score may be, misery loves company, and not until I had pulled out of the Squaw Creek country and started logging in the San Hedrin watershed, did I realize that I had been considerable of a jackass myself.”
“Yes,” Bryce admitted, “there can be no doubt but that you cut off your nose to spite your face.”
There was silence between them for several minutes. Bryce's thoughts harked back to that first season of logging in the San Hedrin, when the cloud-burst had caught the river filled with Cardigan logs and whirled them down to the bay, to crash through the log-boom at tidewater and continue out to the open sea. In his mind's eye he could still see the red-ink figures on the profit-and-loss statement Sinclair, his father's manager, had presented at the end of that year.